Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  Like its earlier namesake, the end to the Great War of the twentieth century would spawn a literature commensurate with its subject. Before that deluge broke, and following their late-nineteenth-century flourish, studies of Wellington and Waterloo went through a relative hiatus. The influential professional historian, Sir Charles Oman, wrote the entry on the Hundred Days for the Cambridge Modern History (1906), but its salient note was its focus on the ‘amazing delay’ of the Prussians on 18 June. Best known for his magisterial history of the Peninsular War, Oman, like Napier and Roberts before him, admired Wellington the soldier but not Wellington the man (‘this hard and unsympathetic figure’). Major A.F. Becke published the most durable early-twentieth-century account of the battle, Napoleon and Waterloo, in 1914, but he was hardly original in his conclusion that, ‘Wellington’s skill and leadership combined with the admirable tenacity displayed by his troops enabled the Anglo-Dutch Army to hold its position and wear down the Armée du Nord. Blücher’s arrival and wholehearted cooperation then enabled the Allies to overwhelm the last of the Grand Armies’.543 Easily the most original new work was by Thomas Hardy. As a young man, he had known ‘many Waterloo men’. In middle age he spoke to some of the last surviving veterans at Chelsea. He also visited the battlefield in 1876 and again in 1896. In between whiles, Hardy’s plan for a novel set around the campaign evolved into something far grander. He began serious research and writing in 1897, but it was a decade later before the third and final part of The Dynasts was completed. The single-volume edition of 1910 runs to over 500 pages.544 It was, as its subtitle proclaimed, ‘an epic-drama of the War with Napoleon, in three Parts, nineteen Acts and one hundred and thirty Scenes’.

  Hardy wanted The Dynasts to be regarded as his masterpiece. He was particularly proud of his account of the pre-battle fauna. It allowed him to offer, literally, a new perspective on events. On the eve of Waterloo:

  The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels,

  The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled;

  And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals.

  The snail draws in at the terrible tread,

  But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim;

  The worm asks what can be overheard,

  And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,

  And guesses him safe; for he does not know

  What a foul red flood will be soaking him!

  In 1919, Walter de la Mare wrote of The Dynasts that, ‘We are as close to actual experience as words can bring us.’ The Waterloo sections, roughly a tenth of the whole, remain impressive. Though Hardy has Napoleon say that it is England who has ‘thumbed me by the throat, And made herself the means of mangling me!’, he devotes several scenes to the movement of the Prussians on 18 June, and more than once has Wellington saying that he needs them to arrive. Hardy’s main conclusion, however, evident both from his private correspondence and in The Dynasts, is that Waterloo was decided, as it was for Hugo, by fate. He ends the work on a note of optimism (‘a stirring thrills the air […] till It fashion all things fair!’), something the experience of the Great War caused him to regret by 1918. That, perhaps as much as anything else, explains why the work never enjoyed great popular success and quickly fell out of fashion after Hardy’s death in 1928.545

  Those who wrote about Waterloo soon after 1918 found it difficult to resist prejudice engendered by the conflict just ended. Sir John Fortescue, the historian of the British Army, reached his volume covering the Waterloo campaign in 1920. Though he was admiring of Blücher and the ordinary Prussian soldier, his anti-German feelings are at times palpable, as for example when he relates the fate of the French cannon after Waterloo, ‘which with characteristic arrogance and dishonesty the Prussians promptly appropriated to themselves’. His particular bête noire was Gneisenau, whom he unreasonably held to account for the Prussians not having reached Waterloo earlier. ‘If the Prussian staff, with Gneisenau at its head, did not foresee these complications and their inevitable results,’ he wrote, ‘it stands convicted of gross incompetence; if it did foresee them, and of deliberate design contrived them, it cannot be acquitted of despicable disloyalty to the Allies of Prussia and to the common cause of Europe.’ Not least of Gneisenau’s crimes was his suspicion of Fortescue’s cynosure, Wellington. The Duke may have made the ‘unfathomable’ decision to leave 18,000 men at Hal, but he more than compensated for it, for, ‘wherever weakness was, there by magic appeared Wellington, perfectly calm and collected, inspiring all with confidence and fortitude. He said himself that he personally saved the battle four times, and, if he had said forty times, he would not have overstated the truth.’546 It was the most adulatory assessment of the Duke’s handling of the campaign since Roberts a quarter of a century before. In some ways, a better inter-war account of the battle was provided by Georgette Heyer’s 1937 historical romance, An Infamous Army. Based on extensive reading of the printed sources, it remained a staple of university history department reading lists for many years.

  The most important new material relating to Wellington published before the First World War for Heyer and others to draw upon was Frances, Lady Shelley’s diary. Lady Shelley (1787–1873) first became acquainted with the Duke in 1814 and met him regularly in Paris in the summer of 1815. She happily pleaded guilty to the charge of hero-worship. Though her account of the Waterloo campaign is disappointing – it is garbled and appears to have been set down several weeks after the event – she is second only to Creevey as a source of anecdote for June 1815. Lady Shelley provides us with the fullest version of Wellington’s already well-known sentiment that he considered a battle won the worst misfortune apart from a defeat, and his consequent hope that Waterloo was his last engagement. She also secured the service of the Duke of Richmond as her personal guide to the battlefield in September 1815, on which occasion he repeated to her what he had earlier told Captain Bowles at the fabled ball, that in his map room Wellington had said, ‘If the Prussians are beat, which I think is very probable, we shall be obliged to retreat. If we do, that is the spot [Mont St Jean] where we must lick those fellows.’547

  Debate as to Wellington’s true character nevertheless continued. Whilst conceding his military abilities, a hostile interpretation of the man was presented by C. R. M. F. Cruttwell in 1936. Lady Shelley was one of several women he insinuated had become the Duke’s lover. This was the more incomprehensible to Cruttwell because he judged the Duke:

  aloof, bleak and cold to his subordinates, that he was on the worst terms with his eldest [sic] son, that he never had a friend, that the Creeveys, Crokers and Arbuthnots were only agreeable parasites and that he had an unpleasing reputation for the pursuit of pleasure without passion prolonged until late in life.548

  Though far less comprehensive in their condemnation, British labour historians, for example J. L. and Barbara Hammond, were also clear that Wellington entertained no sympathy for the common man. They ascribed the draconian sentences handed down in Hampshire following the 1830 agricultural labourers’ disturbances (the ‘Captain Swing’ riots), in part to his being present throughout the special commission held in Winchester to try them. Some 101 of the 285 cases heard had resulted in capital convictions.549

  The best and most sympathetic inter-war life of Wellington was Philip Guedalla’s The Duke (1931). Written in his allusively epigrammatic style, Guedalla reflected that Wellington’s ‘memory […] seems a trifle faded. He cast so large a shadow once […] he survives to later memory as little more than the instrument of a single victory and the gruff hero of a dozen anecdotes.’ Wellington, he suggested, had been militarily far too successful for British tastes. He had fallen victim also, to the cult of Napoleon, and even more so to his post-Waterloo reputation as an anti-Reform Tory. Since, Guedalla reasoned, the political history had been written predominantly by Whigs such as Macaulay, ‘the Nineteenth Century tended to belittle his entire achievement’. He might have added the early-twentieth-century too. George Kitson Cla
rk’s 1929 tome on the Conservative Party after 1832 concluded that Wellington’s reputation sank ‘behind his military glory […] it was Peel’s achievement and character, and not the Duke’s, that were to dominate the next eleven years of Conservatism’. Guedalla duly set himself the task of explaining for a new generation why Wellington’s ‘portrait richly deserves to hang in the great gallery of English prose’.550 Though he regarded the Duke, at times, as an anachronistic and anomalous figure, it was largely thanks to Guedalla’s biography that a Wellington of substance was restored to the reading public.

  The story of Waterloo during the inter-war years, initially at least, was one more of completion than restoration. In a belated centenary act in 1921, the Royal Artillery Barracks at Aldershot were renamed the Waterloo Barracks. Another piece of deferred business was the British Empire Exhibition, originally scheduled for 1915. It finally opened on St George’s Day 1924, not, as had been planned, at Crystal Palace but at the newly-constructed Wembley Stadium. On Waterloo Day 1924, The Times wondered how many children attending the exhibition would be able to explain the significance of the date. Presumably some, if only because the newspaper was selling copies of its 22 June 1815 edition at its stall in the exhibition pavilion. A year later, in a further consciously retrospective centenary act, the Club Anglo-Belge laid a wreath at the Evere memorial in Brussels.551

  For some, the memory of Waterloo was kept alive by personal connections. In a notable coincidence, the 4th Duke of Wellington, a grandson of the first, died on Waterloo Day 1934. The passing of descendants of lesser Mont St Jean alumni also attracted newspaper coverage. A son of William Leeke, who as a 17-year-old had carried the colours of the 52nd at Waterloo and subsequently wrote a celebrated history of the regiment, died in 1925. This prompted inquiries as to how many siblings of Waterloo men were still alive. The answer was reckoned at about forty. One of the last, Kate Cam (still alive in 1936), was the daughter of George Erving Scott. He had been an 18-year-old ensign with the 62nd in 1815 and subsequently went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge where his poem on Waterloo beat Macaulay to the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse. Perhaps the past was not so very far distant? In 1930, the Minister of Health, Arthur Greenwood, claimed that he knew of a case where an 18-year-old who had fought at Waterloo had married a young woman when he was over 60. As the widow was still alive in 1930, she would qualify for the new Widows’ and Orphans’ pension.552 Greenwood’s story may have been contrived, but society was at last awakening to its responsibilities for its veterans.

  One celebrated veteran, who had lapsed into relative obscurity since Ansdell’s mid-nineteenth-century painting of his capturing the Eagle of the 45th, was Charles Ewart. Ansdell had wanted the painting to go to Chelsea Hospital, but it was sold for 900 guineas in 1874. When it reappeared on the market in 1910, Ansdell’s son bought it and presented to the Hospital, where it was hung alongside the Eagle, resident since 1835. The attendant publicity brought Ewart’s story to a new audience, including the detail that his sword had been acquired by W. H. Lever, founder of Lever Brothers, who displayed it in Port Sunlight Museum. Ewart himself, meanwhile, lay forgotten in his Salford grave, which had become part of a contractor’s yard. In 1936, following a twelve-year search by a veteran of his regiment, it was rediscovered. Ewart’s remains were re-interred in a grand ceremony on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle in 1938.553

  There was a less seemly response to what should be done about Waterloo Bridge. Cracks, caused by subsidence, were reported in 1923. More than a decade of wrangling then ensued over whether Rennie’s structure should be reconditioned or demolished and rebuilt. It involved debates in Parliament and a royal commission; a young John Betjeman devoted a radio broadcast to the subject in 1932. Though the majority viewpoint moved in favour of a new bridge, some concern remained that the only national memorial to the battle should disappear. This was scotched by Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede who said that, ‘In this vulgar and utilitarian age I am afraid the word Waterloo conveys to most people not a battle but a station or a cup, and the idea that people reverence this bridge because it is a war memorial, I think must be dismissed as an exaggeration of sentimentality.’ In truth, the arguments were primarily ones about aesthetics, cost and the practicalities of dealing with the capital’s burgeoning road traffic problems. London County Council eventually voted for a rebuild in 1934. Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the replacement Waterloo Bridge was not officially opened by Herbert Morrison, erstwhile leader of the Council, until December 1945. A plaque commemorating the fact boasts, scandalously, neither the name of Wellington nor his soldiers, but those of Morrison and his former colleagues.554

  In the same year that Waterloo Bridge was reported to be subsiding, General Sir William Robertson bemoaned the fact that few homes now displayed military pictures: when he was young, there were scenes of Waterloo ‘hung in every cottage in the land’. Waterloo was, in fact, contrary to what he and Lord Ponsonby thought, still popularly remembered, albeit in new art forms perhaps unfamiliar to them. In July 1913, a film of Waterloo premiered at the London Palladium to widespread acclaim, apparent proof that Britain’s fledgling film industry could compete with its American counterpart. The cast of 1,000 horses and 2,000 people included local shoe workers, as well as 500 unemployed men, who each received 2 shillings for two days’ filming. Shot at Irthlingborough in Northamptonshire, with Jack Brighton as Wellington, the hour-long film was completed in three days at a cost of £6,000.555 It spawned an eight-minute comedy, written by, directed and starring Fred and Joe Evans. The first in what became known as the Pimple parodies, part of the joke was its cheap production. With echoes of Macaulay’s Wellingtoniad and anticipating Blackadder, the Evans brothers had Napoleon assaulted by a suffragette before he arrived at Waterloo station, where he flipped a coin with Wellington for the right to take first shot. He was finally charged by Boy Scouts. The battle provided the subject matter for further films in 1923 – minus any reference to the Prussians – and 1929, when the 2,000 extras were accused of having no idea of what they were doing. A short film version of Conan Doyle’s A Story of Waterloo was released in 1933; George Arliss portrayed Wellington in The Iron Duke, which premiered before the Prince of Wales in November 1934 and raised £7,300 for Great Ormond Street Hospital. On the stage, the actor Stanley Holloway won acclaim for his comic monologue, ‘Sam and his Musket’ (presumably an updated version of the Victorian ‘Bill Adams’), the story of a Lancashire guardsman on the eve of Waterloo; whilst the newly-chartered BBC broadcast radio concerts on Waterloo Day.556

  The popular depiction of Waterloo through new media may have encouraged some to visit the battlefield for themselves. This occasioned surprise in some quarters:

  because of the Great War it was thought Waterloo and its memories might no longer attract. This belief has been proved to be wrong. The number of visitors to Waterloo is still as great as in pre-war days; and is even said to have increased. Cars full of foreign visitors can be seen every day making the trip from Brussels to Waterloo.557

  A combination of visitor numbers and the apparent indifference of the Belgian authorities to take preservation of the site sufficiently seriously led to some depressing, even alarming developments. By 1930, the memorial to Colonel Gordon had become so unsightly and inaccessible that £100 was needed for its refurbishment. Mont St Jean farm, which had served as the main field hospital for Wellington’s army in 1815, was sold in 1930; La Belle Alliance was sold for £820 in 1937.558 In 1933 a Bill to allow building on the battlefield was introduced in the Belgian Parliament. The novelist, John Buchan, was amongst those who protested and got the British government to lobby against it. Though the Bill lapsed, four years later the provincial authorities wanted to widen a stretch of Wellington’s famous sunken road; they showed little inclination to address the problems of decay occasioned by damp at Hougoumont, where the kitchen gable was said to be in danger of imminent collapse. They had, perversely, acted to save the Lion’s Mound from a simi
lar fate in 1923. Well might Philip Pilditch, as the 1930s drew to a close, enter the plea that:

  it is true the magnitude of operations in the Great War has reduced the Battle of Waterloo to the dimensions of a skirmish, but there is something in that campaign of a few days, culminating in a clash of as many hours, that still holds the imagination of the world, when the genius of the Captain leading the army of one of our Allies in the World War failed in his aim by very little, owing to the loyalty of the leader of the forces of our recent great enemy and the stubborn valour of the Allied soldiers under our own Chief. If the alignment of the nations presents a different picture today it must not be forgotten that the battle profoundly affected the course of history for several generations.559